Why Microsoft has made developers horrified about coding for Windows 8

Inexplicable silence

Given the justified fear this has struck within the developer community, one might have expected Microsoft to do something to put minds at ease. After all, if the company isn't in fact going to trash the knowledge and experience of every current Windows developer, it would probably be a good idea to get that message out.

Instead, the company has decided that the appropriate response is to say that D9 wasn't a developer-focused event, and that the company will talk about the development platform in September at its BUILD event. And beyond that? Nothing. Not even so much as a "don't worry, there will definitely be a way to use .NET and native code to write immersive applications, we're not going to render your experience irrelevant, you're going to be able to use the tools you're familiar with." Nothing.

Abandon ship

This is a dangerous strategy. Windows is still going to be king of the corporate desktop for a long time to come, so developers of business-oriented line-of-business applications have little choice but to like what Microsoft is making them use, so regardless of their frustrations there's little real risk in that market. But the same isn't true of developers in targeting more consumer-focused tablet and smartphone markets. Redmond is behind in both of those; Windows Phone is less than a year old and is off to a slow start, and the company won't have a credible tablet platform at all until Windows 8. To succeed in both markets, the company needs shiny new immersive applications. That's not a sufficient condition—having applications isn't enough to assure success, you need users for that—but it's a necessary one. If Windows 8 tablets have no tablet applications, they'll never be able to challenge the iPad.

One of the big things the company still that has in its favor is its development tools and large developer community. Windows Phone clearly demonstrates the value of this community: the platform is punching well above its weight when it comes to the number of applications available. Already it has more than 20,000 applications, surpassing webOS's store, and arguably BlackBerry's App World. The fact that Windows Phone uses Silverlight for its development has plainly been instrumental in this growth. It's so easy, familiar, and perhaps even fun to develop for the platform that people are doing so in spite of the low user numbers.

Those developing for the phone might well expect to be able to directly apply their phone expertise to Windows 8. Tablets powered by both Apple's and Google's operating systems can run software built for their telephonic siblings, and an equivalent facility for Windows 8 tablets is surely a no-brainer. Even those who haven't yet taken the phone plunge are sure to be interested in using their existing Windows development skills to develop tablet applications.

Yet these developers now feel they're being told that if they want to target the tablet, they've got to throw away all that they know. The very developers that the company should be courting are being given good reason to doubt the future of the platform. And they're genuinely angry and worried by this. The prospect of being stuck with HTML5 and JavaScript for their development is encouraging them to jump ship.

The rebirth of the application

The great irony in all this is that for the longest time, Microsoft treated Web applications as an existential threat. If the Web itself became the platform then people would no longer need Windows applications, and hence they would no longer need Windows itself. The aggressive moves to crush Netscape and win the browser war was a direct response to this perception; if the Web were to become the platform, then at the very least Microsoft wanted it to be a Microsoft-controlled Web, accessed through Microsoft products.

A decade after Microsoft's victory in the browser war, far from seeing the replacement of rich client applications by Web applications, we're seeing explosive growth in the client application field. Rich applications—many of them front-ends to cloud-hosted Web applications—are booming, thanks to the smartphone and tablet markets. The enormous success of Apple's App Store and the Android Market has bucked the trend towards Web applications, and reinvigorated the development of rich client applications, as developers are using them to provide better, more capable, user experiences than they can achieve with the Web alone.

While this trend may not last forever—the Financial Times' Web application, designed as a deliberate end-run around Apple's App Store policies shows that there's still a lot of interest in the Web app model—it's still the case that real applications are hotter and more important today than anyone would have predicted five years ago.

Smartphones and tablets have made applications important again, and Microsoft, more than any other company in the world, should be able to capitalize on this. Microsoft has the best development tools and a huge wealth of third-party developers who are just waiting for the chance to bring their skills to bear on the company's new tablet platform—just as long as it will let them.

Mad, but not stupid

Microsoft remains silent. It's apparently happy for developers to think that HTML5 and JavaScript are the only option for immersive Windows 8 applications, regardless of the distress and damage this is causing. And the longer the company remains silent, the more convinced people will be that the reason that Microsoft isn't debunking the claims is because there's nothing to debunk: HTML5 and JavaScript really could be the whole story when it comes to immersive applications. If it isn't, the decision to say nothing is incomprehensible. Saying nothing can only hurt. Developers are losing faith in the platform today; waiting to September to set them straight is madness.

But Microsoft isn't stupid. Its messaging and PR around this issue may be crazy, and the way developers have responded is rational, but the company isn't going to alienate its enormous base of developers and force them to trash everything they've ever learned. Windows 8 will offer a new API, and you're not going to have to write webpages to use it.

The company may not have made any official statement about it, but leaks are coming out, and a picture is starting to emerge. The details aren't clear yet, but next time we'll take a look at the pieces of the puzzle we have, and we'll learn why Windows 8 won't be a HTML-driven horror after all.